The release of the film version of Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel from 1957, On the Road, reminds us that, without a literary agent and gentleman of the old school named Sterling Lord, chances are we would never have heard of the mythic Kerouac. Along with the work of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, On the Road pioneered the Beat Generation.

He is 92, dapper in his tailored jacket, a charming and decent man with shrewd eyes who still goes to work every day at the agency he founded. We met at Le Pain Quotidien, which is in the same building as his office, on Bleecker Street, in downtown Manhattan. “I’ll have a bowl of minestrone soup followed by the kale Caesar salad with chicken, thank you, Allyson.”

“You’re welcome,” she said sweetly. “No problem.”

Coincidental with the release of the On the Road film, Sterling Lord has written a memoir, Lord of Publishing (published this month by Open Road), and if it reveals one wonderfully unabashed thing about him it is his love of writers. “Losing a longtime client,” he writes, “can feel like death.” Among the renowned authors he represented, apart from Jack Kerouac, are Ken Kesey, Howard Fast, Gloria Naylor, Terry Southern, Dick Francis, and Nicholas Pileggi. Lord, who apparently put them all before anyone else, has been married four times.

“Would it be fair to say that you were better with writers than wives?” I asked.

“Well, that’s true! I can’t refute it. I guess growing up I learned more about writing than women.”

His father, who managed a store in the small town of Burlington, Iowa, where Lord was raised, knew how to bind books and taught the craft to his son. It created his near-psychic connection to authors. But it would take him four long years of rejections—a number of them from leading editors in the land—before he at last found a publisher for On the Road, Viking Press. “I had no idea whether it was going to be a big success or not. But I thought Kerouac’s voice was different and should be heard. That’s all I was thinking.”

“That’s a lot,” I said.

“Darn right!” he replied.

Today, sales of On the Road in the U.S. alone amount to some five million, and Kerouac’s estate has been estimated to be worth $20 million. In 2001 the famous 119-foot-8-inch-long scroll of architectural tracing paper on which Kerouac typed On the Road was sold at Christie’s for $2.43 million—a world record for a manuscript.

Before taking up the agenting game, Sterling Lord was a magazine editor (he was fired from Cosmopolitan before the era of Helen Gurley Brown). He was just starting out as an agent when the broke and virtually unknown Jack Kerouac ambled into his one-room office in 1951. He had been sent there by the esteemed editor Robert Gi­roux, co-founder of the future holy trinity of publishers, Far­rar, Straus and Giroux.

“Jack told me that Bob Giroux had rejected On the Road. But years later he insisted he didn’t reject it; he said he never read it!” Giroux was thrown by the unique scroll format and sternly advised Kerouac to retype it as a conventional manuscript. It was the retyped version that Kerouac handed to Sterling Lord later that week; the hallowed scroll would remain locked in Lord’s safe for many years.

The hungry midwestern literary agent and the working-class renegade writer got along well in Eisenhower’s America—though they appeared to be opposites. “There’s no reason those opposites can’t join forces,” Lord explained. “I sat down very early on and realized I wasn’t locked into any publishing tradition. I wasn’t an easterner or an Ivy Leaguer. I was about 20 years younger than any other agent. It was an opportunity.”

Kerouac struck him as very different in person from the convulsive way he wrote. “He was a little shy and retiring, and courteous. A diamond in the rough. I was fond of him. He was very serious about his work. On the Road was rejected so many times he asked me to stop submitting his material. But he had to write. I respected him. He respected me. Respect is the key to a good relationship in this business.”

Jack Kerouac’s meteoric rise and alcoholic flameout reside within the tragic tradition of great American artists. (He died, aged 47, in 1969.) He just wasn’t able to come to grips with his overnight success. “He couldn’t handle it. It was all too quick and overwhelming for him.”

Sterling Lord didn’t drink or take drugs—yet he and Kerouac remained firm friends until the end. “I used to stay with him when he had a house out in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he lived with his mother,” he reminisced. “They named a guest room ‘The Sterling Room.’ ”